[santoshalper]

Possibly technically correct, but utterly irrelevant. The 3dfx chips accelerated parts of the 3d graphics pipeline and were not general-purpose programmable computers the way a modern GPU is (and thus would be useless for deep learning or any other kind of AI).

If you are going to count 3dfx as a proper GPU and not just a geometry and lighting accelerator, then you might as well go back further and count things like the SGI Reality Engine. Either way, 3dfx wasn't really first to anything meaningful.

[FeepingCreature]

But the first NVidia GPUs didn't have general-purpose compute either. Google informs me that the first GPU with user-programmable shaders was the GeForce 3 in 2001.